Sriram R. Ramaswamy

Biosketch

Sriram Ramaswamy is a theoretician who works on nonequilibrium, soft-matter and biological physics. He graduated high school from the Modern School, New Delhi, in 1973. He received his BS (physics, High Honors, 1977) from the University of Maryland and his PhD (physics, 1983) from the University of Chicago and, after postdoctoral work (1983-86) at the University of Pennsylvania, joined the physics faculty at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore where he is currently Honorary Professor. From 2012 to 2016 he directed the TIFR Centre for Interdisciplinary Sciences, Hyderabad. Sriram is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2000) and the Infosys Prize (2011), and is a Fellow of the three Indian science academies (IASc, INSA and NASI) and of the American Physical Society. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2016, and International Member of the NAS in 2025.

Research Interests

Sriram has made important contributions to liquid crystal hydrodynamics, the glass transition, quasicrystals, and sheared and sedimenting suspensions. Beginning with the theory of membranes with pumps, he co-founded the field of Active Matter -- systems, such as living materials, whose constituents continually convert free energy to work. His "active hydrodynamic" approach has yielded a host of successful predictions -- aligned states are unstable, swim stresses alter viscosity, +1/2 defects in active nematics self-propel, a motile minority can create macroscopic organisation -- with relevance to living matter from the cytoskeleton to flocks. His current interests include motile/non-motile mixtures, nonreciprocal interactions, and chiral active matter.